Mercury News: Ex-CSFB banker charged with `spinning’ violations. The key evidence of this allegation revolves around the timing of a December 2000 e-mail message Quattrone sent to employees endorsing a colleague’s suggestion to purge company files. Quattrone’s e-mail was sent two days after he had learned of a grand-jury probe into the firm’s allocations of hot initial public stock offerings. That triggered federal and state criminal probes into whether he was trying to obstruct justice, a charge he denies.
Quattrone’s defense on the spinning charge is that everyone else was doing it. Did they do it to the same degree?
Whatever, it seems likely that Quattrone is in more and more serious trouble as time goes by.
Oh, he may escape serious punishment, at least in the legal sense. He can spend a few of his ill-gotten millions on legal help, and he’ll undoubtedly continue to have a certain amount of PR support from some of the people he enriched through his infamous “Friends of Frank” operation.
But history will remember him in a deservedly negative way — though you have to wonder if someone who took home hundreds of millions of dollars in the process of a tainted career will care very much.
Quattrone, an enormously talented man by all accounts, could have succeeded honorably. He understood technology’s potential long before almost anyone else on Wall Street, and his efforts helped bring to life some companies that will stand the test of time and markets.
But he came to personify the worst of Silicon Valley — the rampant greed, the “screw the little guy” mentality that pervaded technology’s epicenter in the late 1990s. His reputation is stained for good reasons.